"A blog is to a writer what a canvas is to an artist." ~ Colleen Redman

~ The following 2015 review was done by excerpting the first line or few in one post from each month last year. You can click on the name of the month for a full accounting.

January – In my world, the only thing better than going out dancing for a case of the winter doldrums is to do it with a light show. Throw in a hula hoop and a really good draught beer and you have a full scale therapy.

February – We spent Valentine’s Day celebrating my son Dylan’s birthday and shooting arrows from his new birthday bows. I know. It’s a boy thing. And I was the only one not wearing camo.

March – A Crocus Sun Salutation: They raise their purple petals like holy grails of spring / expose their hearts of gold / for giving and receiving.

April – Eating beignets – New Orleans’ take on Native American’s fried dough – is a French Quarter rite of passage. I wanted to eat a beignet on Tuesday so I could take a picture and caption it: Getting Fat Tuesday, but I didn’t get to try one till Thursday.

May – The apple blossom weather for the 16 Hands Studio Tour and little girls in pink lifted my spirits this weekend. Floyd blogger Fred First coined the phrase Earth Day on Floyd Time.I covered the Floyd Earth Day Eco Expo for the local paper, not on April 22 (which is actually Earth Day) but on May 2, which is where I snapped the picture of my friend Valhalla that I call “Valhalla is My New Earth Day Poster Girl!”

June – At Folly Beach we eat seafood off Frisbees and dig to China on the beach. Our four year old grandson Liam has learned to wear flip flops, take outdoor showers and love plums.

July – You don’t need to rub two sticks together to start a fire at Floydfest: Grace Potter fired up the crowd singing Fire on the Mountain and Burning Down the House late Saturday night. While she was doing that, the giant wooden Phoenix in the main field was getting ready to be lit-up in a ritual performance of letting go of what is no longer needed.

August – It’s that time of year again. We’ll not really. There are fires and droughts in California, record breaking heat in the Southwest and other severe weather events consistently being reported. Here in Virginia, the seasonal wildflowers and fruits are almost a month early. There was a time when we picked apples in October.

September – I drag my royal blue beach recliner around the yard like a cartoon caveman drags a woman. It’s like a clock that circles the yard, follows the orbit of the sun and tells of my recent whereabouts. It’s a heavy chair, but I have to find just the right spot, open but protected and private, behind the trees or the garden fence, somewhere I can sunbathe without clothes and not be seen by my neighbor on his lawnmower, where I can soak up the sun like a voltaic cell, expose my eyes that are prone to tear duct infections, make some Vitamin D.

October – It’s a fairy tale of carousels, spells and confetti, Impressionistic valleys and Van Gogh gold. It’s a Seurat painted scene of once upon a time with a hip hop drop from a mountain climb, where the red trees flame to light the traveler’s view. All the better to see you with my dears.

November – When I heard from my sister Kathy’s oldest daughter Chrissie that Kathy might not make it through November and would probably not be there for her daughter Beth’s wedding on November 7, I went out and bought her a birthday card. Kathy’s birthday is in January. Maybe we could hope for that long. The card was gold and said something like ‘the best way to give to the world is to be loved.’ I bought it as a wish that Kathy would make it for her birthday, but I also knew her timing for leaving the world would be uniquely her own and that her end would have its own wisdom.

December – You know that scene from A Christmas Carol when Scrooge wakes up with a change of heart after having been visited by the ghosts throughout the night? It’s Christmas morning and he goes to the window to shout down to a little boy and ask what day it is and whether the prize turkey is still hanging in the butcher’s window. Well, that’s how I feel when I hear Joe’s truck pull up and I fling open my bedroom window, look down and see that he brought us home a deer.

About

From the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia I write to synthesize what I'm learning at the time, whether it be poetry, a political commentary, or a letter to my family in Hull, Massachusetts, where I'm originally from. Whenever I don't know exactly what it is I'm doing and it borders on wasting my time, I call it research. 'Dear Abby, How can I get rid of freckles?' was my first published piece at the age of 11.